Creating UBLinux

Customizing Anaconda

As mentioned previously, Anaconda is intended to be customized through use of the buildinstall command. As we were having difficulty using this, we instead opted to alter stage2.img (which stores anaconda) directly. First, we need to mount stage2.img
and alter its contents. If you followed the previous section, the file should be located in /home/ublinux. Otherwise, you can get the file from RHEL WS 3 CD 1 in /RedHat/base.

Now we need to copy the contents to a directory where we can alter the files. The issue with RHEL WS 3 which we didn't experience with RH9 is that there are several hard links here that will NOT transfer over if we simply copied /mnt/anaconda somewhere else. For this reason, we used tar to package the contents of the directory, and then untarred them where we could work on them.

If we did not do this this way, then when we
included the final stage2.img in our distribution we'd get a "CD Not Found" error when Anaconda would load.

With the contents of stage2.img in an editable directory, you can now alter the images used by the installer located in usr/share/anaconda/pixmaps and the images used in the installation slideshow in usr/share/anaconda/pixmaps/rnotes. You can also edit the text in the left sidebar, which are in HTML format, in usr/share/anaconda/help/[locale].

After you've made the desired modifications, we need to compress this information back into an img file.

cd /home/ublinux
mkcramfs stage2/ stage2.img.new

Then, copy the altered stage2.img to the RedHat/base directory in the first CD.